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networking

I'm slowly inching back into a routine which includes blogging. I wanted to share with you some of what I learned today.

As part of my research at the Packard Foundation, I've had the opportunity to attend a lot of briefings and discussions related to social media and network effectiveness. This morning Peggy Duvette and Angus Parker from WiserEarth spent some time at the Foundation sharing their experiences in building successful online communities of action and networks of networks on the WiserEarth online platform.

I appreciated the introduction from Peggy and Angus because while I was aware of WiserEarth, I wasn't entirely clear what it offered and the benefits of using the platform. Now, I'm a fan!

“I knew that if we could understand the connections and visualize the breadth of global efforts on behalf of social and environmental justice, we would recognize the largest movement the world has ever seen. WiserEarth is where this movement can begin to see itself.”

WiserEarth is more than a "green" online social network for individuals, although you join as an individual. The vision is to help the global movement of people and organizations working toward social justice, indigenous rights, and environmental stewardship to connect, collaborative, share knowledge, and build alliances. The WiserEarth platform does this through a variety of strategies.

First, there is the Directory - the largest international directory of non-profits and socially responsible organizations - approximately 110,000 from 243 countries. (There is also an Open API so this information can be repurposed on other areas of the web.) You'll also find a detailed taxonomy of issue areas related to social justice and environmental restoration.

But the most interesting part of WiseEarth platform is the groups feature. It allows groups of individuals or organizations or a mix to set up a space online to engage in discussion, share resources, or collaborative on projects. What's nice about this feature is that has a lot of flexibility - so you can set up private spaces, semi-private spaces, or public spaces. It's designed for networks of networks and communities of action, whether the network or community consists of people or organizations.

Some of the groups have been set up by organizations to convene workgroups of staff or collaborations across organizations and need a secure online space to do their work. For example, The Nature Conservancy is part of a group called the US Fire Learning Network group. The features inside of groups include discussion board, file archive, wiki, events, a map, and a number typical features to support online collaborations.

An example of "semi-private" group, is the Permaculture Alliance of California. This was initially set up by an individual passionate about permaculture and wanted to pull together all the various grassroots, ngos, and individuals working on the issue.

If you're like me, you're probably wondering what the heck is permaculture. Luckily, there are some subject matter experts here at the Foundation who answered:

Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and perennial agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in the natural ecologies. It was first developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren and their associates during the 1970s in a series of publications. The word permaculture is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture, as well as permanent culture.

The intent was that, by rapidly training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals could design their own environments and build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements — ones that reduce society's reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that Mollison identified as fundamentally and systematically destroying Earth's ecosystems.

While originating as an agro-ecological design theory, permaculture has developed a large international following. This 'permaculture community' continues to expand on the original ideas, integrating a range of ideas of alternative culture, through a network of publications, permaculture gardens, intentional communities, training programs, and internet forums. In this way, permaculture has become both a design system and a loosely defined philosophy or lifestyle ethic.

So, what's very unique about this platform is that is flexible enough to support activists who want to weave together their personal networks around a particular sustainability issue. It can also support the work of organizations and networks of organizations. But, the value-added is that you find and connect with other people and organizations that you may not know about - just as you would on a social network like Facebook or Twitter. But the value here is that all members are interested in sustainability.

When you set up an account, it is much like setting up a profile on a social network. Except, that when you connect with others, you invite them to join your personal network. On your profile, similar to Facebook, you can see your friends photos and names, but you can also navigate through your social graph visually. Above is the visual representation of my social graph on WiserEarth - it shows me groups, interest areas, and friends. I click on a name and explore their network.

Peggy and Angus shared some tips for online community building. These include:

What are your goals? Pick three things you want to do together.

The importance of a technology steward or online moderator

Think about what you want to accomplish and pick the tools/features to support that work

You will probably be using a variety of tools

The importance of piloting an online space before going to scale(here's an example)

Today I had several discovery moments of serendipitous learning via Twitter. I am noticing lately, that I am hearing all my news before it even hits the web, let alone TV, via Twitter. There is something so gratifying about reading a news-ticker on the bottom of MSNBC TV and saying , “Yeah, old news, read a tweet about that 5 minutes ago.” Twitter is becoming more important to us every day, and it will soon change the way we live. It definitely changes the way we are perceiving what is current and the way that we are receiving information.

When I was 12, I remember my father used to mock me for obsessively checking my voicemail. “You’re not a doctor”, he’d say, because he was one. I used to obsessively check my email, and then I moved on to obsessively checking my Facebook feed, but now I try desperately to limit my distraction and ADD time and I just manically check my tweet-stream.

Today, one of the hundreds of time i was obsessing on TweetDeck, my lens of choice, to see who was saying what and who was talking or re-tweeting me, I noticed that someone whom I respect in my field, Online Community Manager, Angela Connor, was talking about stuff I found to be interesting and using a hashtag I didn’t recognize, #Cmtychat. I followed the hashtag, and I was all of a sudden immersed in a lively discussion of community managers from all over the world, talking about what we do and sharing best practices.The discussion hour was half over by the time I arrrived there, but I tried to join in without seeing too lame and ignorant. One of the things I learned in this event was the new members to a community often felt embarrassed to post for the first time, and it is imperative to welcome the newbies and encourage them. This is something that is common sense, but it was among hundreds of rules of thumb that were nice to be reminded of.

I joined in and started tweeting about my work with Nonprofits and Online Community and mimicked the behavior of the others. Soon, I was being addressed by them and responded to, and I was really happy to have stumbled upon this spontaneous and free conference about online community. I started observing my own behavior as a community newbie (to their conference) and reflected upon my behavior, using it as a lesson of how to better manage the communities that I run.

I used the #Cmtychat hashtag at the end of my few posts, and then discovered that the technology was even deeper then just tagging your tweet.

I clicked into the discussion and found myself in a new site that was just an aggregator of all of our tweets who were using that hastag. There is a tool called TweetChat and as you can see from this week’s community chat conference, it grabs all the posts with the same hash tag, deposits them into a separate silo, giving you the experience of being in a separate chat room, rather than distributed all over Twitter, which is actually what is happening. Best of all (albeit a little unnecessary, unless you are seriously lazy), if you tweet from the Tweetchat engine, it will add the hashtag for you. I discovered this when I added my post there, with the hashtag at the end, and then saw it posted in Twitter with a double hashtag. (Oh, the many ways we can go on about being embarrassed by tweeting. I guess that will be another post entirely.)

So, it was quite a hyper-real and helpful experience learning about online community best practices and doing it on an entirely new tool, having not been invited to participate and just jumping in and chatting, which put me in the shoes of a newbie, somewhere I haven’t been for 9 years.

Twitter is a networking tool, in addition to all the other reasons we tweet, and I now have dozens more followers and people I follow, whom I may only had met if I was actually attending the same forum or conference with them. However, in this instance, the simple curiosity about a tag, brought me into the event, and I will definitely be going back every Friday at 11am-noon PT.

You're looking at my first grade class, circa 1964. (Can you guess which one is me?) I haven't kept in touch with most of my first grade classmates, although I remember all their names. I hadn't thought about my first grade teacher, Mrs. Segal, in over 40 years until this weekend when she friended me on Facebook!

Do you remember the line -- "It's not what you know, it's who you know." It means roughly that to get things done you need to build up social capital, not just knowledge. When I first started my work in the nonprofit sector, I worked in the development office and this phrase was often used to describe what was needed to be an effective fundraiser.

Social network sites, like Facebook, are making it very easy for us to connect and build relationships with people we know, might want to know, or knew in the past. Social networking site, like Facebook, are making it easier to accumulate and maintain our social capital. Although it takes relationship building and other steps to actualize it.

I am thinking about the "Facebook Generation," those who have grown up with social networking sites. They will have the potential to remain "connected" with everyone they have met growing up. Think of it - they will have the opportunity to create a lifetime of social capital.

That thought makes me wonder about social networks will continue to change our lives and our work. Will the nonprofit development officer of the future say, "It's not who you know, but whether you're connected with them online."

If you're thinking about how to streamline using Twitter, Vladis Krebs offers excellent advice in "So Many People, So Little Time." He recommends using social network theory to design your Twitter following strategy. (Following = people whose Tweets you read.) It boils down to following the few to find the many!

SourceOrgNet, Vladis Krebs

It isn't about following thousands and thousands of friends on Twitter. We don't have the time or brain cells for that. Don't just pick an arbitrary number and start pruning. It isn't about finding a small number of people who have large networks either. It's about finding people who are connected to different social circles and
following them. (Of course you have to be interested in what information or conversations they are sharing Twitter, too). Identifying these people or what Krebs calls "nodes" is core of social network analysis.

And you need to build some redundancy in your network so you have a few multiple paths to people and ideas of interest to you.

He explains why this approach is efficient:

And this is why I follow
so few people on Twitter! For the time invested, I want maximum return.
I use the redundancy of connections, between the many social circles I
am interested in, to my advantage. I follow a select group of people
that give me the same access as following someone in every group.
Follow the few to reach the many!

Because I have chosen them
carefully, I want to actually read the tweets of the people I follow. A
small part of my "following network" is always in churn, but the number
of people I follow on Twitter never exceeds 100 [currently I follow
about 70]. Those who follow thousands of people readily admit that they
can not read the fire hose of tweets they get every day.

Strategically
I am building a small, yet efficient, group that reaches out into the
many diverse information pools I am interested in. I know I am finding
good people to follow on Twitter by the number of great exchanges that
emerge on many topics. Think before you follow, use your time and ties
wisely!

This is a shift from earlier debates about the optimal number of people to follow on Twitter and social conventions. There was considerable discussion about the following to friends ratio (the number of people whose tweets you read compared to the number of people who read your tweets) and whether you should follow everyone who follows you. This can create a lot of noise as Louis Gray points out.

There were some early tools to analyze these ratios, including Twitter Ratio which also describes some Twitter user patterns based on this ratio which are more humorous than anything else. Twitter use behavior is evolving. A few months back, Tim O'Reilly made this observation.

Some Twitter tools, like Tweetdeck, help you group your followers into smaller subgroups. But the tool and process I'd love to see is something that lets you create a social networking visual of your friends and followers on Twitter and helps you understand the results.

If you have a large number of followers because you auto follow or by accident, you don't need a tool manage it. Apply a little social networking theory and think before you follow. Ask yourself, if you were stuck on desert island and could only follow 150 people, who would you choose?

How do you choose people to follow on Twitter? How many people do you follow and why? How do you manage it? What value do you get?

Her response to the question about "What online tools do you use to help you network?"

As you can expect, I use LinkedIn and Facebook a lot for networking.
For the longest time, I've tried to be exclusive about who I accepted
as a "friend" but gave up on that given my visibility in the space. So
I pretty much accept any invitation. But I use these sites, as well as
Twitter and FriendFeed, to stay up on what people are doing. If I have
a one on one meeting, I'll check out their online profiles, updates,
and blog, so that I'm up to date. And I'm always impressed when someone
has done their homework on me, even down to the last tweet that I made
before a meeting.

I also use Facebook and sites like Upcoming to find out who is going
to an event in advance. I may send a note to someone, letting them know
that I'll be there, and hope to connect.

I like how she connects online/offline networking and that we can't loose the importance of connecting face-to-face and at conferences - and how these tools can extend your networking capacity before as well after an event.

Charlene also references another important issue - the issue of your friending policies if you are using these tools to support or enhance a professional network. It made me think that I have slightly different approaches on different spaces. I am also thinking about making my "friending" policies more formal.

Flickr: On flickr, I pretty much friend people who request it. However, I do look at their photos first. And I take a quick look, and scream EWWW. I don't friend them. Many times I can I do see an visual connection or I might know of the person by reading their profile.

Facebook: I will immediately approve a friend request on Facebook if I recognize them or know or have recently met them. But, if someone I don't immediately recognize requests to be friends - then I will ask them why they want to be friends - time permitting. What has been happening lately - because I get so many request s - I end up ignoring them. If someone sends a personal message with some context about why they want to be friends, then I will friend them.

Twitter: My updates are unlocked. This is my "loosest" network.

LinkedIn: I treat LinkedIn as my rolodex and tend to friend people who I know or have met. I tend to use LinkedIn quite to network through my contacts to find people I'm specifically looking for.

What's your friending policy on different sites? How does it support your professional networking strategies? How do you connect your online and offline professional networking tactics?

Come join me in a discussion about how to effectively pump up your professional network with social networking tools over at Social Edge beginning on September 23rd.

Professional networking --meeting and connecting with people who can help you get things done-- is an indispensable skill for social entrepreneurs. Using online social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Twitter can help you reach your networking goals.

But they are just tools. The secret sauce is relationship building, and here's the recipe:

1. Meet people as people first.

I borrowed this phrase from Connie Bensen, a social media guru who writes about networking 101.

It is the quality of the relationships that you build online that really matters, not just how many people you meet.

Don¹t always ask people to help you or give you something every time you interact with them. And please don¹t make that your first point of contact with someone you have just met. That's a huge turn off.

It¹s important to be helpful, share resources and connect people to other people. Social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, let you glean a lot of information about what your friends are up to or might need. Set aside some time to check status lines and think about how you may be helpful to them, not the other way around.

It¹s like putting money in the bank for a rainy day. You will be surprised in the many ways approaching your network this way will reward you.

3. Interweave and connect with others within your network and keep connected

Uplift people in your network when they need it and they will do so back. Take every opportunity to keep connected to people in your network. It is like tending a garden.

I schedule time each week to tend to my network. It is part of my daily routine ­5 to 10 minutes per day. I also try to take special care to follow up after I've met someone at a conference where the connection reallyresonated. Here's some wonderful conference networking hacks from Chris Brogan.

Liz Strauss says: "Meet your friends by noticing people who have ideas that intrigue you and begin by asking them to elaborate on what they said."

No matter how busy I am, I try to connect with new people each week. I also get lots of new ideas by connecting with people who are outside my main industry or topic area. Life can get boring if you get stuck in a silo or only interact with people who think just like you or cover the same topics. Be a renaissance, cross-disciplinary networker. Think creatively about the new types of people and connections you want to make. Think outside your subject matter area.

5. Build your network before you need it

There are many reasons why it is important to invest in your network before you need it. As you¹ve probably gathered from reading the other tips, building a vibrant professional network is doesn't happen over night. People don't easily trust people who come asking.

6. Invest in yourself first

I like to share what I know with other people, but before I can do that I need to keep investing in my learning. For me, that translates to carving out time for my professional reading and blogging everyday. And the great thing about having a blog, is that it is a really extraordinary networkingtool!

- What works for you?- Do you have any advice about using online networking tools?- What type of expertise or connections have you found through networking?- What kind of connections has proven more difficult to make?

Come join in a discussion of this topic over at Social Edge this week.

An online community is an interactive group of people who are joined
together by a common interest. Whether your organization creates its
own branded social networking site, connects with people on blogs or
sets up a presence on a larger online social networking site like
Facebook, Digg, or YouTube, a critical factor for success is having an
online community engagement strategy. An engaged online community can help your
organization attract more traffic, loyal supporters, more content, more
links, and other values. But it requires investing the time to build
relationships with members (yes, even one-on-one interaction) or what
we call "network weaving skills." This module covers the key touch
points for developing an online community strategy and a look at
network weaving skills.

It is super easy to participate. Share
a couple sentences about your experience from your nonprofit organization, or point to an excellent
resource and add a sentence to describe it. Be sure to include your name with a link to your email or web
site next to your contribution. We'll pick six contributors randomly to receive a copy of Ben or Brian's awesome books.

This week I am an online mentor on the topic of "Effective Online Networking" as part of the Networking for Success project at the the Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre.
My opening post shared some ideas and tips. There were so many wonderful comments and blog posts that I've been able to summarize the wisdom in these three posts -- read them for context, if you're just joining this thread. Skip, if you've been following.

Adam Cohen left a wonderful comment with some awesome practical and tactical advice about personal social networking:

I can't remember the book this came from, but the best specific tip I
have ever received about networking is a question to ask when you are
at events and meeting people: "If I were to refer someone to you, what
would I tell them?" It has always garnered a great dialog and let's
down the walls people put up about promoting themselves. Not to mention
I learn a lot and love to connect the dots for people that can value
each other.

This got me thinking ... always a dangerous thing ... about pick up lines. I googled and found this post. And, please, don't get offended, I just had to laugh ...

Michelangelo: I feel like before I met you, everyone I’d ever known was made of stone.

Leonardo da Vinci: I find your smile absolutely intriguing.

Vincent Van Gogh: Ear’s lookin’ at you!

Sigmund Freud: As far as I’m concerned, there’s just you and my mother–I mean, and no other.